An online course to study comic books? Sign me up! No, seriously, I already signed up. This spring the Canvas Network is offering a massive open online course called Gender Through Comic Books, taught by Ball State University’s Christina Blanch. Aimed at students college-age and up, the course will explore gender roles in comics from DC Comics, Marvel, and more. The goal of the course is to take a detailed look at “how comic books can be used to explore questions of gender identity, stereotypes, and roles,” with comics luminaries like Mark Waid, Scott Snyder, Gail Simone, and more providing their own input and insights.

I had the chance to ask the course instructor Christina Blanch about what students can expect in the course, and she revealed that the course will not only cover how men and women are portrayed in comics, but also discuss current comic book culture like the “fake geek girl” debate.

GeekMom: What inspired you to use comic books as a medium to explore gender roles?

Christina Blanch: I was taking a class on Women and Education for my doctorate. For the final project we had to write a paper and my professor, who is also my mentor and an amazing woman, encouraged me to step out of the lines and do something different. I had been researching Mort Weisinger and how he as editor changed the Superman Family books, focusing on Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, and I thought using comic books could be a way to approach teaching gender without the trepidation some students feel. So, I wrote a paper on how a class could be developed using comic books to teach gender.

One of the students in the class taught for Women and Gender Studies and thought that it would be a good class and suggested it to the department chair. Next thing I knew, they asked me to teach the class. And it was such a great class – the students were all engaged and simply amazing.

GM: Can you give any hints about topics you’ll be exploring in the course?

CB: The first thing we will cover is what exactly gender is. People often times think it is synonymous with sex or is feminism in disguise. This class is about men and women and how we can learn about gender through its social construction, as politics, as a diffuse concept, and as a lived experience. Constructions of gender vary from culture to culture and change throughout time. In the class we will look at how gender is constructed and how the stereotypes of certain gender traits are perpetrated by the producers of cultural material. Masculinity and femininity have traits associated with them that are not equal with a person’s sex.

We will look at how women and men are represented in comic books and see how masculine or feminine they are.

With the recent “fake geek girl” debates, I also plan to talk about the comic book culture and who consumes the material.

And finally, we will look at the producers of the comics themselves through live interviews with some of the leading comic book writers and editors today. Using Google hangouts, we will interview writers such as Mark Waid, Scott Snyder, Gail Simone, Terry Moore, and Brian K. Vaughan. We will also get the editorial perspective from Marvel editors Steve Wacker and Sana Amanat. And through the miracle of technology, we will be able to randomly choose several students to be able to directly ask the interviewees questions. It should be an enlightening experience for the students.

GM: Will your course explore characters from both Marvel and DC Comics, as well as some of the smaller publishers?

CB: Yes! We are exploring a lot of different types of comic books. I wish we had more time, it’s only six weeks, so we could get more into autobiographical comic books, but time is so limited. We will read some Marvel and DC, like Captain Marvel and Batman, but will also be looking at books from smaller publishers that put out amazing books like Strangers in Paradise and Saga.

GM: Why did you choose to teach this course as a massive open online course (MOOC)?

CB: I really didn’t choose to do it as a MOOC. I was teaching the class last semester on campus and Ball State approached me and asked me if I would teach it as a MOOC. It’s been interesting working on ways to engage a large audience in the subject and still trying to keep the personal aspect. This will be my first time teaching a MOOC so it’s been a steep learning curve. I’m both excited and nervous, which I think is a good combination. I have a lot of great people at Ball State and the Canvas Network helping me with the technical aspects, so I think it will be amazing.